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iOS 9.3 allows apps to add content from Apple Music directly to your library

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In his security and privacy post regarding iOS’s current music library, Ben Dodson adds a small addendum explaining that with iOS 9.3 apps can now add music that currently exists in the Apple Music catalog directly to a user’s music library. While a small and under-discussed feature, it opens up further possibilities for many different kinds of apps and application developers.

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Apple execs Eddy Cue & Craig Federighi talk Apple Music, App Store & more in new interview

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Eddy Cue Craig Federighi

John Gruber surprised podcast listeners today by getting Apple’s own Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi on The Talk Show to discuss a variety of topics behind Apple. Since Tim Cook took leadership at Apple, it hasn’t been unheard of for Apple execs to appear on Gruber’s show. The first occurrence was last June when Phil Schiller met John Gruber on stage during WWDC to discuss Apple’s recent announcements and decisions over the past few years. This marks the second time that Federighi has been on the The Talk Show, and Cue’s first.


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All eyes on today’s iPhone 6S/iPad/Apple TV announcements as Apple reportedly not holding October event this year

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9to5Mac has been saying for a while that Apple’s Hey Siri event today will be a product blitz of announcements, with at least three major new products set to be shown off: the new iPhone 6S, the new larger iPad Pro and a revamped Apple TV with a new remote. There’s also likely to be a new iPad mini and some updates for Apple Watch — you can read it all in our roundup.

Some people were confused about why Apple is stuffing so many announcements into one event. Having called a single event “not logical” earlier in the day, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber now agrees with our prior reports: breaking tradition, there won’t be an October event this year.


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Vesper 2 for iPhone adds sync support for backing up notes (Vesper for Mac next)

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Update: Brent Simmons write on his blog that Vesper for Mac is indeed next.

Vesper received a major feature update overnight bringing one of the most requested features to the note-taking app: support for sync. Vesper, the project of John Gruber, Brent Simmons, and Dave Wiskus under the name Q Branch, was released almost a year ago for the iPhone and decidedly lacked iCloud sync (due to reliability) or any alternative. Simmons has since been journaling his experiencing with building an in-house sync solution for Vesper on his Inessential blog if you are interested in reading the behind-the-scenes work that goes into such a project…


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Our own Mark Gurman joins John Gruber to discuss Greg Christie, Healthbook, and more

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Our own 9to5Mac Senior Editor Mark Gurman joined John Gruber of Daring Fireball on The Talk Show this week to discuss Greg Christie’s departure, Apple’s upcoming Healthbook application, and Apple news reporting in general. The episode is just under two hours long and can be downloaded from Soundcloud. iTunes users and subscribers will find the episode available here. You can also listen to the episode below.
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Expected iOS 7.1 likely arriving ahead of iTunes Festival at SXSW next week

Update: Didn’t happen. That “little birdie” is “for the birds”.

ios 7.1

In a brief note on Daring Fireball, John Gruber makes a notable connection between Apple’s planned iTunes Festival at SXSW next week and the pending release of iOS 7.1:

Apple’s first iTunes Festival in the U.S. starts a week from today at SXSW in Austin. Apple is going to stream the performances to iOS devices using an app, but I’ve heard from a little birdie that the app requires iOS 7.1 (which explains why the app isn’t out yet). That means iOS 7.1 should ship any day now.

The fifth and most recent developer preview of iOS 7.1 was released four weeks ago from today, and we reported a few days later that the public release was slated for March.
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Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and friends launch Vesper note capture app

John Gruber wants you to collect your thoughts.

That’s the goal of his new note capturing app called Vesper that he launched today with fellow Mule Radio podcaster Dave Wiskus as well as developer Brent Simmons. Gruber and friends launched their development company today called Q Branch and Vesper for iPhone is their first app… and boy is it flat!

You can drive Vesper for iPhone starting today for $4.99 on the App Store.

Update: Rene Ritchie of iMore has an interview with the team on this week’s Debug podcast.

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Charlie Rose talks iPhone 5 with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, NYTimes’ David Pogue [Video]

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Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and The New York Times’ David Pogue went on the “Charlie Rose” TV show last night to discuss and share their thoughts on the iPhone 5. While both technology bloggers adore Apple’s latest smartphone, Gruber longed for two-day battery life and Pogue seemed annoyed by the new Lightning connector.

Watch the clip above for more insights.


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iPad mini will look like a large iPod touch with smaller side bezels [Gallery]

We received a number of tips over the last few weeks from sources that we have reason to believe hold knowledge about Apple’s plans on the upcoming iPad mini. A recurring theme of late is that the iPad mini will “look like a big iPod touch” with smaller bezels along the sides in portrait mode and separate volume buttons and not a “rocker” and a mic on the back.

In addition, we received a number of different iPad mini back plates with the best quality being these from case maker Devicewear.

We were not confident enough to post the above information alone (but did make the atop mockup), but the very reliable John Gruber chimes in today with many of the same bits of information.

Here is a gallery of all the iPad mini images and mockups we have obtained to date:
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Gruber: TBA sessions on WWDC schedule could point to apps for Apple TV

In a post where he admittedly overanalyzed the recently released schedule for WWDC 2012, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber speculated that the high amount of “To Be Announced” sessions could indicate the launch of a new developer platform. His bet? Apps for Apple TV:

To me, this is what a preliminary WWDC conference schedule would look like if Apple were set to announce a new developer platform, like, say, apps for Apple TV. Apps for Apple TV is just a guess — I’ve heard not a single whisper about such a thing from any Cupertino area little birdies. (Cf. the aforementioned Tim Cook quote about Apple doubling down on secrecy.) But it’s one of the few things I can imagine would that would be big, new, and different enough to warrant that much attention at WWDC.

This tidbit follows reports from this morning that claimed Apple is set to introduce a new Apple TV OS and APIs, which could work with the unconfirmed Apple HDTV. We noted this morning that a new Apple TV OS raised questions, especially because Apple introduced a revamped Apple TV UI in March. We will have to wait a couple weeks to find out for sure, but we are expecting to see at least thinner, redesigned MacBook Pros, iOS 6, and Mountain Lion. Some of the TBA sessions could be for Retina Mac apps.

Apple will kick off WWDC with its keynote presentation at 10 a.m. PST on June 11.

Gruber: iPad 3, Retina Display

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Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber today makes note of his complaints about iPad magazines (all valid), including the large files and static page sizes. But he also mentions casually, but apparently factually, that the iPad 3 will have a 2048×1536 Retina Display:

These magazines and newspapers that render each “page” as a static 1024 × 768 image are going to look like utter ass on the iPad 3’s 2048 × 1536 retina display.

Unfortunately, there is no timeframe given to this and with some expecting a Fall upgrade and others putting the release update as far out as next March, we’ll have to wait and see.

We earlier found bits of code which seem to indicate that an upcoming iPad will indeed have double the resolution as the current iPad 2.
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